John Gower's Allegories.

Author/Editor
Knapp, Ethan.

Title
John Gower's Allegories.

Published
Knapp, Ethan. "John Gower's Allegories." In Oxford Handbooks Online (2017): n.p. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.59

Review
Knapp proposes an overall assessment of Gower's work, paying particular attention to what he calls its "mechanical allegory"--a concept he borrows from Coleridge, who opposed it as a poetic type to "a poetics based upon the symbol," i.e., Romanticism as we have come to know it. Such mechanical allegory, to quote Coleridge, was "but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses." Knapp then "considers what drew Gower to the mechanical side of things," arguing that Coleridge's notion is "central to several of [Gower's] most interesting solutions to problems of poetic representation." He looks at the "Mirour de l'Omme," the "Vox Clamantis," and the "Confessio Amantis" to observe how Gower's "mechanical allegory" functions in each. The M) he finds "exemplifies the significance of naming in the poetic project, along with its so-called voicing," pointing to the repetitions of "je te resemble" preceding descriptions of Sin (e.g., ll. 9949, 9961, 9973) as evidence, in that this naming moment "is clearly meant to be a climactic one." It is, however, "entirely devoid of narrative content," showing us instead "what we might call 'a drama of naming'" [emphasis his]. Gower turns to hand similarly a non/narratorial "je" (an example of what A.C. Spearing's termed "autography") to create not a "speaking subject" but a "rhetorical device for bundling together the rather miscellaneous catalogue form of the 'dits'." Such a "je," like the "drama" of naming fits Coleridge's notion of the "mechanical" because each "foregrounds the lack of organic connection between abstraction and image, and instead revels in the drama of the poet's act of naming." Knapp turns to what he calls the "'voicing' of the poem," seeking to explain the MO's "tripartite structure" in terms of the shift from the "je" of the first section to the "vox populi" in the second. (He never addresses the third, Marian section.) The VC he finds, somewhat controversially, also tripartite, taking the "Cronica Tripertita" to be, not a poem composed separately, but as an intended third section of a single VC--a kind of "eighth book," one might say. Thus, Knapp sees Gower "sandwiching . . . the estates satire material . . . between two explicitly historical narratives," which "must suggest an intent here to tie the satire very closely to actual historical reality." Asking why this should be, Knapp notices that this historical reality, particularly in the "Visio," is ekphrastic to a degree uncommon in Gower's work: his transformation of the rebelling peasants into animals "creates a world essentially without speech, a pure vision of movement and destruction." Such a wordless world "renders the agency of the poet null"--and produces a "mechanical allegory" which facilitates "Gower's project in this work, which is precisely to attack a historical event of agency without language or reason in the interests of establishing the primacy of the voice of ethical satire at the center of the work." As for the CA: "the grafting of the theological discourse of sin/ethics onto 'fin amor' . . . is also organized around a central representational difficulty: . . . how to represent the 'impairing of the world' that is crucial to the historical dimension of Gower's diagnostic scheme in the Prologue." Knapp focusses on sculpture as a medium of discussion, arguing that Gower (unlike Chaucer) rarely presents images two-dimensionally, preferring the three-dimensional. This dissimilarity with Chaucer Knapp explains as "two different semantic fields" surrounding "image," with Gower reading it theologically, "nearly as a synonym for 'icon'" (Knapp's emphasis), "honored in orthodox practice and attacked by the Lollards." He then examines various statues appearing in the CA: the account of the pagan gods in Book V, Nectanabus' use of the wax image to seduce Olympias in Book VI, finding Nectanabus an "anti-Pygmalion, one who sculpts not to create something of surprising vitality but rather something that is made in order to melt away," and ultimately the Man of Metal in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar--perhaps the best (in the sense of most obvious) example of "mechanical allegory." In the destruction of the Man of Metal, Knapp especially, but also in all of Gower's statues, "a strange projected temporality" that helps him read the CA as presenting "an object world caught between the quick and the dead." The CA then insists "that the entropic drift of history can never be eluded." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2017

Gower Subjects
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification